My mother had parked her car in Newcastle, but accidentally purchased train tickets that took us further south to York.

‘It’s OK’, we assured to her, ‘We just get off at Newcastle. Nobody will care if we leave our seats at the earlier station’. Unfortunately my mother cared, and was prepared to pay for a stack of single tickets from York to return us all to Newcastle.

The one advantage of this plan was that the conductor, who knew that I was a huge fan of the train, offered to take me on a private tour of the National Railway Museum in York. I boasted that I already knew where I would be in September 2025 for the 200th anniversary of the Stockton to Darlington railway.